PR - Last week I told you we had a secret new open source project to release. Think of it as an early Christmas present. A project that you've never heard of and has nothing to do with JavaFX (which is partially untrue, but I'll get to that in a second). Well, it's almost the end of the week so here is the secret. You can listen to MP3 announcement (played on stage at the JavaPosse's JavaPolis session), or simply read on. We are releasing an Open Source 100% Java PDF Renderer/Viewer That's right, a 100% Java library which can parse PDF files and draw them to the screen. It's (creatively) named the SwingLabs PDF Renderer, and hosted at pdf-renderer.dev.java.net. It's the same license as the rest of SwingLabs (LGPL) so you can easily embed it in your own applications. Several of us inside the desktop Java team here at Sun have been working hard on getting this released and now it's finally here. Go check it out at pdf-renderer.dev.java.net.

So, you probably have a few questions. First of all:

Why should I care?

You should care because PDF is one of the formats that makes the web go 'round. Soon to be an ISO spec, PDF is the standard way of exchanging non-interactive documents on the web. Everything from tax forms to clip art can be stored in PDFs. Mac OSX makes heavy use of PDF both as an asset format (the many widget images found in Aqua) and also as an ideal archive format using AppleScript workflows. PDF is everywhere.

Once a PDF is created you know with great certainty that it will display and print exactly as you want on any platform. Hmm. Write a PDF once and run it anywhere? Sounds like a good fit for Java! Combined with PDF writing libraries (like iText), you can do pretty much anything you want with PDFs.

What can I do with it?

Anything you want! You can embed a PDF in your Swing app, draw on top of it, and even render to places other than the screen (like PNG images). The awesome guys over at Project Wonderland have even started experimenting with projecting PDFs into their 3D shared universe. Most importantly, we know you'll come up with things we never thought of. That's why we are open sourcing it.